Failure Is the Mother of Invention
wsj.com
wsj.com
John Cage once said: If you make a mistake, repeat it.
A trumpeter getting stuck once in a melody is clearly a mistake, them doing the same thing again, and then spinning the thing into a different direction is not only perceived as interesting, it is probably one of the moments where their true genius will become visible the most.
Key to this is to not be too attached to the plan, but to the goal. The plan is that melody you had in mind, or on the sheet. The goal is to play interesting music. If the plan is in the way of playing interesting music, ditch it. If the an is no longer feasible because you fucked up, the plan needs to be adjusted.
This sounds logical for music, but in all other domains (except maybe art and design) people have a very hard time ditching or adjusting the plans immidiately at the point of failure. Kill your darlings and you will get new ones.
Instead of the required Bösendorfer 290 Imperial, the organization team brought a smaller and badly tuned piano on stage. Jarrett - who was a bit of a diva at times - initially refused to play, but gave in, and the recording is the thing of legends.
I love the "failures" of Victor Borge
(check out youtube videos)
Granted, I mostly saw it in banking, but I assume it is not that uncommon.
The opposite of Exploration is Exploitation. Exploitation minimizes known failure, at the cost of also minimizing invention.
Google: Wave, Orkut, Google+, Google Video, Google Glass [1]
Microsoft: Band, Bob, Kin, Zune, Lumia, Windows 8 [2]
Facebook: Poke, Parse, Beacon, Credits, Paper, Slingshot, Libra [3]
That's just products. If you go into security breaches, lawsuits, and operating procedures, you could list several more.
These companies are large enough to have big failures and still keep kicking, and have people start to forget the failures over time (I had forgotten several of these myself). But they definitely aren't immune to having big failures.
[1]: https://www.lewis-lin.com/blog/2018/2/26/googles-product-fai...
[2]: https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-failures-windows-vista-cortana...
Except those companies, or the people who founded them, also had early failures. For instance, Zuckerberg's original site was more akin to "Hot or Not" than Facebook and got shut down by Harvard. Gates certainly had failures, as did Larry and Sergey. Just because the company they founded was successful from inception doesn't mean it wasn't a struggle to figure out how to get there. It would be wild to me to assume that there are people out there, walking among us, who have never failed.
Microsoft has had a number of failed products, even some versions of windows are considered to be failures.
Each company has learned from the failures though, which I think is a main point of the article.
Can’t be here until you observed back there, because here does not exist without having moved from back there to here.
Qualifying it as failure is subjective and crap poetry coupled to contemporary productivity culture. It’s a success in that you learned. It’s only a failure because it didn’t unicorn.
If you aren't making mistakes, you aren't making anything.